There has been and will be cooperation. Why do we need to pay individuals salaries and hope they "cooperate" as if they weren't already? If there's already the incentive to work together, distribute strengths as necessary, and efficiently organize roles in order to solve the problem at hand and secure the prize? The detriment of the salary is that when you have an official salaried "development team," it presents the idea that we already have the developers we need and we just need to wait and let them do work now that they are paid a salary. This is not conducive towards attracting new and possibly better talent!
vokain, you seem to be making two different points: (1) that salaried developers will hard to find, because of the political and managerial duties that come with a salary; (2) salaried developers are bad for the development for the project. I think it's important to state these two points separately. I have tried to respond to (1) in a previous posting, what are your thoughts?
Regarding (2): If I understand you correctly, you are worried that by having a pre-established team of salaried workers, we'll be scaring away talent that is not salaried. But one could easily apply this same argument to bounties: by only providing bounties, and not a real salary, we are scaring away developers who are looking for a longer-term commitment and job security. I not only think this is possible, but even quite likely!
No one is saying we shouldn't have bounties *on top of* salaried positions. What the community is rejecting is the much more inflexible idea of having bounties *instead of* salaried positions.
There is always the possibility that one is missing out on talent. The problem is that while trying to account for every potentially missed opportunity, you may hurt the project. I believe that right now Mastercoin is being hurt by not having both salaried developers as well as bounties.